There are inexpensive compact cameras that offer more photographer-friendly features than the 808, but as a cameraphone, the Nokia blows its competition out of the water, and significantly narrows the gap between dedicated cameras and portable communications devices to the point where ultimate convergence seems all but inevitable (and probably sooner than some commentators had realised).

Nokia didn't release the 808 PureView in the hope of making much of a dent in the smartphone market - the Symbian operating system is obsolete, and Nokia's future plans are focussed on Microsoft's Windows Phone OS. If you want an 808 in the USA, you'll have to pay full price ($699) since no carrier (to date) is subsidizing the hardware through contracts on this side of the Atlantic. But while the Nokia 808 might not be an iPhone or Samsung Galaxy killer, it is a fascinating and compelling product, and one that has added a definite shine to Nokia's reputation in the tech industry, which was looking a little tarnished, to say the least.

The 808 proves that Nokia can innovate, and its PureView technology has piqued the interest of serious photographers, being one of the most important innovations - arguable the most important - in mobile photography since the smarphone era dawned five or so years ago. As such, the 808 is intriguing not just in itself, but because of what it represents. Things could be about to get interesting...

Why are people obsessed with megapixels? Do they not understand that all it does is produce huge files that aren't any better quality when they're used at normal sizes than the 8 MP (or whatever) cameras that are more typical? Unless you plan to blow a picture up to wall size, going to this many megapixels is not only useless, but it's stupid.

Give me a 300 MP camera and I will never need a telephoto lens again! Assuming, the quality is decent;)

The 920 already has a significant edge with world's first OIS on smartphone. How much edge? According to dpreview.com (a very reputable photography review site), 3.5 stops. Difference of 3.5 stops is HUGE. If you don't know what that means, ask your photography expert friends.

Read-deal according to who? Nokia gave Pureview name both to 808 and 920 because of this reason:

"I think it’s important to underscore that PureView doesn’t mean any specific technology. It’s the latest and greatest in imaging. When you buy a Nokia phone with PureView, you are getting our highest quality imaging innovation. Nokia 808 PureView solved the problem of zooming and sharpness, and for Nokia Lumia 920, it was low light." -- Juha Alakarhu, head of imaging technologies of Nokia

Why are people obsessed with megapixels? Do they not understand that all it does is produce huge files that aren't any better quality when they're used at normal sizes than the 8 MP (or whatever) cameras that are more typical? Unless you plan to blow a picture up to wall size, going to this many megapixels is not only useless, but it's stupid.

The company isn't using megapixels as you think. In the traditional sense, yes, more megapixels means a larger file size and the ability to make the picture bigger. In this case, they use it to create 8MP files. The next question is why they do this... well it comes down to how pixels capture light and pictures are taken. By sampling the same point with many pixels they are able to get a better picture, since the pixel information can be combined to give better color and produce an image in lower light. Combine it all together and voila!

I think part of what tripped so many people up is the use of the term 'oversampling'. In audio, this means capturing 'extra' data beyond what a human can perceive and it works by using that extra data to correct for loses in later manipulations of the waveform. However, there is no such thing as over sampling in imaging. Your signal is the photons that are incident on your detector. You need to count all of them to get the best possible image, though no real detector is that efficient. Counting them with one big pixel or many smaller elements of the same area and averaging them will produce the exact same signal with the exact same noise.

To prove to yourself that there is no over sampling in digital imaging, take a picture of a uniform object, zoom all the way in (beyond 100% scale), and you will see noise. Until cameras get to the point where you see a field that appears uniform to the naked eye, the image has not been over sampled. At that point, we can have this conversation again. Right now, the Nokia camera under samples even worse than other cameras of the same area, then corrects back to what it would have had by pixel averaging. The exercise accomplishes nothing other than costing money.

Let me reiterate- any and all improvements in quality that this camera has over other phones is from the size of the detector being larger than other phones, not the pixel count.

Big sensor, big good quality lens, and reasonable number of jiggapixels. Omit any one of the three and the images won't be that good.

There's a reason professional SLRs are large and expensive.

Don't get me wrong. 41MP point and shoot is intriguing. When the 41MP image is shrunk down to 3-5 MPs for use on the web or to print a 3x5 it will look better than the native 3-5 MP P&S, sure. Even the noise, which WILL be present, is going to mostly disappear. But other performance metrics, such as low light, will still be bad. I'd rather have an 8 MP SLR than a 41MP teeny tiny sensor and teeny tiny lens point and shoot. But we don't know how to fit an SLR into a phone. So you get what you can get.

With the Nokia 808 PureView, you get effective maximum aperture throughout the zoom range.Whereas with optical zoom, less light tends to reach the sensor as the zoom increases. At maximumzoom, 5.4x more light reaches the Nokia PureView Pro sensor than a broadly equivalent optical-zoomdigital camera (f/5.6 as opposed to f/2.4). And this means you get the benefit of faster shutter speeds.

Quote:

e.g. If a conventional digital camera set to ISO 100 uses a shutter speed of 1/30th second,the Nokia 808 PureView uses 1/180th second in the same lighting conditions. Or, looking atit another way, if a digital camera uses ISO 600 for a shutter speed of 1/30th, the Nokia 808PureView could maintain the same shutter speed with ISO 100 — significantly reducing thevisual noise you’d see in the resulting image. This also means that the Nokia 808 PureView’seffective flash range is virtually maintained at all zoom levels, rather than being significantlyreduced as the zoom increases.

I don't know if that makes sense, because I don't have a master degree in maths and, sadly, don't make 300k.

Let me reiterate- any and all improvements in quality that this camera has over other phones is from the size of the detector being larger than other phones, not the pixel count.

Yes, detector is larger, and pixel density ~= noise levels is comparable to other smartphones.

As a result, there is a viable digital zoom, with 5-8mp crop of the center not any worse (in terms of possible noise or resolution) that most other smartphones, and at wide angle - it's better in either noise, or resolution, or both.

Whether Nokia will deliver similar results to the 808, in a more compact package, without sacrificing much of sensor size or lens brightness, remains to be seen. But if they do, in the typical 'smartphone/point&shoot'-friendly conditions, like outdoors on a sunny day, framing a typical picture 'my girlfriend and a palm tree', it's a good thing.

Give me a 300 MP camera and I will never need a telephoto lens again! Assuming, the quality is decent;)

Except for the fundamental geometry changes that you can produce in the optical pathway when using a zoom lens, of course. People rarely thank you for take a portrait at 16mm outside of objectifying booty shots.

So it will take HUGE bad cellphone pics? Great! When it comes to digital photography the MP isn't anywhere near as important as the quality of the sensor. For example, I have a nice old Canon 300D digital SLR which is 6.3 MP. My cellphone has an 8.0 MP camera. My 300D takes FAR better photos than my cellphone. The older DSLR's photos have better color depth, better detail, can better deal with poor lighting or very contrasty situations, and MUCH less noise. In other words the DSLR has a better quality sensor in it.

I think part of what tripped so many people up is the use of the term 'oversampling'. In audio, this means capturing 'extra' data beyond what a human can perceive and it works by using that extra data to correct for loses in later manipulations of the waveform. However, there is no such thing as over sampling in imaging. Your signal is the photons that are incident on your detector. You need to count all of them to get the best possible image, though no real detector is that efficient. Counting them with one big pixel or many smaller elements of the same area and averaging them will produce the exact same signal with the exact same noise.

I agree, and I have to admit you and S_T_R are correct. I wasn't thinking of photosites as discrete photon event detectors, with the spatial oversampling happening after the number of photon and false positive hits are registered over a time window (basically, multisampling in the time domain). An earlier post by S_T_R made me reconsider my thinking--so I ran a numerical experiment where I had one large detector with a random sample of "hits" over time composed of a set of true hits (signal) or false hits (randomized)--the sum basically giving me an intensity. I then generate four other signals, each registering about a quarter of the hits from the original signal and each with a unique randomized stream of false hits, calculated four intensities, then averaged them. I repeated the test several times over different time windows and sure enough, the intensity results for both are basically identical and neither is better than the other at rejecting the noise and reporting the intensity of the ideal signal. So unless my super-simple model of the detector is missing something important, you guys are right! It doesn't work at all like per-sample averaging of analogue signals.

Wow. Did most of these commenters crawl out from under a rock? The 808 was released last year. To people. They have tested it. It takes great pictures. Sometimes you need to crawl out from under your textbook.

Big sensor, big good quality lens, and reasonable number of jiggapixels. Omit any one of the three and the images won't be that good.

There's a reason professional SLRs are large and expensive.

Don't get me wrong. 41MP point and shoot is intriguing. When the 41MP image is shrunk down to 3-5 MPs for use on the web or to print a 3x5 it will look better than the native 3-5 MP P&S, sure. Even the noise, which WILL be present, is going to mostly disappear. But other performance metrics, such as low light, will still be bad. I'd rather have an 8 MP SLR than a 41MP teeny tiny sensor and teeny tiny lens point and shoot. But we don't know how to fit an SLR into a phone. So you get what you can get.

Even a prosumer grade DSLR will take superior photos. Cellphones are not great cameras. they get the job done as simple point and shoot cameras but anyone who wants a good quality photos will use a DSLR.

Wow. Did most of these commenters crawl out from under a rock? The 808 was released last year. To people. They have tested it. It takes great pictures. Sometimes you need to crawl out from under your textbook.

you are clearly not a shutterbug. There isn't a cellphone in existence that can take the same quality photos as a real camera. People seem to think MP is all there is to know to tell if a camera takes good photos. There's a bit more to it than that.

I don't think people here have actually read about PureView. Hint: it's not only about the megapixels, they are only one part of a complex imaging process. For some reason everyone seems to be going crazy about 41 Mp in a phone camera and why it sucks just as any other phone, and so far I've only seen a couple of posts actually mentioning the white paper Nokia wrote for the technology. Just for starters drfisheye quoted a part of it, and notice how they focus on *what* the Mp are for and what they enable, not *that* there are 41 Mp.

The question you have to ask yourself is: if lots of small pixels averaged is actually a good idea, why don't the various DSLR manufacturers do it? This all makes it sound a lot like a pointless PR gimmick to me.

Arguments that a single photosite of the same area as multiple photosites grouped together do make sense until you include the Bayer Filter which complicates it due to each pixel only capturing either Red Green or Blue. Even the best SLR cameras interpolate the other two colors from the adjacent pixels and with large photo sites this has its own drawbacks.

It is not trying to be an SLR or compete with compact cameras, it is trying to be better than camera phones and it is unfair to compare it to anything else... If this were an SLR with proper lens that can zoom you would have made the sensor 16Mp but they want the oversampling for other reasons and decided this was worth doing, in a camera phone.

Wow. Did most of these commenters crawl out from under a rock? The 808 was released last year. To people. They have tested it. It takes great pictures. Sometimes you need to crawl out from under your textbook.

you are clearly not a shutterbug. There isn't a cellphone in existence that can take the same quality photos as a real camera. People seem to think MP is all there is to know to tell if a camera takes good photos. There's a bit more to it than that.

The best camera is the one you have on you. I'm not walking around daily life carrying a Canon EOS. I am walking around carrying my phone. PureView does not take pics that compete with an EOS. It dos, however, take pics of comparable or better quality than virtually every point and shoot on the market. That is fantastic since its also a camera most people would have in their pocket at any given time.

This is a good thing. It raises the bar for portable non-professional or prosumer cameras. It eliminates the need for the point and shoot market. And it raises the minimum quality level.

Also, according to those who review it, it takes exceptionally good pictures, far in excess of any other cell phone and virtually the entire point and shoot market. Which is the point.

Your 'real camera' comment is subjective. My 'real camera' is the one in my hand when I realize I need to photograph something. My HTC 8X is not a EOS either, but when a co-worker of mine had an impromptu wedding in the middle of the workday, my 8X took reasonably good pictures. There was no time to go hit up my house across town to grab my 'real camera'. I'm just glad HTC has spent time improving thier camera quality to the level they have. A PureView camera would have been even nicer.

Wow. Did most of these commenters crawl out from under a rock? The 808 was released last year. To people. They have tested it. It takes great pictures. Sometimes you need to crawl out from under your textbook.

you are clearly not a shutterbug. There isn't a cellphone in existence that can take the same quality photos as a real camera. People seem to think MP is all there is to know to tell if a camera takes good photos. There's a bit more to it than that.

I don't think MP are everything. Nor do I think a cellphone will ever take as good a photo as a large sensor camera.

However the cell phone is inching it's way ever closer to eliminating the need for a point and shoot.

But seriously. Read up on PureView. Look at the photos. It's very impressive - and my point was that this phone is actually on the market, so real people have reviewed it.

Give me a 300 MP camera and I will never need a telephoto lens again! Assuming, the quality is decent;)

If the optics is good enough to resolve the 300Mpx, and there is enough light (or enough time), you don't need a telephoto.

It does not surprise anyone that if you move a film projector closer or farther to a screen, the picture dimensions on the screen change (and so does brightness of a point on that screen, of course ). It's not hard to imagine an open flatbed scanner instead of the screen either (and with Legal paper size and at 600 ppi, it will deliver 40megapixel image).

Convert the same, intuitively clear, setup to a camera, or a smartphone, and suddenly there is a lot of confusion

Big sensor, big good quality lens, and reasonable number of jiggapixels. Omit any one of the three and the images won't be that good.

Provide all three, and quite possibly the won't be any images, because this medium or large format camera will stay in the closet.

That's right. We carry phones with us all the time. I mean all the time. Some of us even use them as wallets. Soon we'll be using them to start our cars and unlock front doors. So we always have that camera with us.

Which is why I said we should accept what we can get until we find a way of incorporating SLR into a cell phone. It seems impossible today, yeah? HA! Nothing is impossible. Someday there will be an Ars article about a 1mm sq SLR sensor outperforming the best large SLR sensors. Then there will be another article about some new mineral outperforming glass in optics applications. Then a year later Apple, Canon, Nikon Nokia etc. will be using that tech in their products.

With the Nokia 808 PureView, you get effective maximum aperture throughout the zoom range.Whereas with optical zoom, less light tends to reach the sensor as the zoom increases. At maximumzoom, 5.4x more light reaches the Nokia PureView Pro sensor than a broadly equivalent optical-zoomdigital camera (f/5.6 as opposed to f/2.4). And this means you get the benefit of faster shutter speeds.

I don't know if that makes sense, because I don't have a master degree in maths and, sadly, don't make 300k.

More light reaches the sensor, but it'll all be hitting the parts of the sensor that you'll be cropping out when you do the digital zoom anyway. There's no free lunch this way, there's only so many literal photons coming through the hole in the front of your camera that came from where you are zooming into. That white paper is nonsense.

Wow. Did most of these commenters crawl out from under a rock? The 808 was released last year. To people. They have tested it. It takes great pictures. Sometimes you need to crawl out from under your textbook.

you are clearly not a shutterbug. There isn't a cellphone in existence that can take the same quality photos as a real camera. People seem to think MP is all there is to know to tell if a camera takes good photos. There's a bit more to it than that.

The best camera is the one you have on you. I'm not walking around daily life carrying a Canon EOS. I am walking around carrying my phone. PureView does not take pics that compete with an EOS. It dos, however, take pics of comparable or better quality than virtually every point and shoot on the market. That is fantastic since its also a camera most people would have in their pocket at any given time.

This is a good thing. It raises the bar for portable non-professional or prosumer cameras. It eliminates the need for the point and shoot market. And it raises the minimum quality level.

Also, according to those who review it, it takes exceptionally good pictures, far in excess of any other cell phone and virtually the entire point and shoot market. Which is the point.

Your 'real camera' comment is subjective. My 'real camera' is the one in my hand when I realize I need to photograph something. My HTC 8X is not a EOS either, but when a co-worker of mine had an impromptu wedding in the middle of the workday, my 8X took reasonably good pictures. There was no time to go hit up my house across town to grab my 'real camera'. I'm just glad HTC has spent time improving thier camera quality to the level they have. A PureView camera would have been even nicer.

You are ignoring the point we are making. Cell phone cameras are good point and shoot cameras. If you want GOOD quality photos your cellphone will never be your first choice. If it's all you have then it's all you have. If you had access to a DSLR then something tells me you would have taken those wedding photos with that camera instead of your cellphone.

And sorry but no a real camera (DSLR) is superior to any cell phone which is why people who like photography and want to take the best photos they can and have the most control over shooting go with a real camera over a cell phone camera which isn't meant to be used to take serious high quality images. When photographers start using cell phone cameras to take photos in the studio and on site THEN talk to me.

Big sensor, big good quality lens, and reasonable number of jiggapixels. Omit any one of the three and the images won't be that good.

Provide all three, and quite possibly the won't be any images, because this medium or large format camera will stay in the closet.

That's right. We carry phones with us all the time. I mean all the time. Some of us even use them as wallets. Soon we'll be using them to start our cars and unlock front doors. So we always have that camera with us.

Which is why I said we should accept what we can get until we find a way of incorporating SLR into a cell phone. It seems impossible today, yeah? HA! Nothing is impossible. Someday there will be an Ars article about a 1mm sq SLR sensor outperforming the best large SLR sensors. Then there will be another article about some new mineral outperforming glass in optics applications. Then a year later Apple, Canon, Nikon Nokia etc. will be using that tech in their products.

This isn't about including a SLR. This is about getting the most performance out of a fixed size of CCD. There's nothing that's been said that suggests a mechanism by which cutting up a CCD and adding back together again gets more performance out of a fixed size of CCD. You *can* put a bigger CCD into a phone, Nokia have shown that. But they have gone about it in a most idiotic way that increases cost and potentially wastes a lot of what they've added.

If this is their strategy, they'll fail the second someone cottons on to this market existing, sells a large-CCD cameraphone without the 41MP gimmick, and so produces a cameraphone that takes better photos and is $200 cheaper. The 808 Pureview, as a camera, is a DSLR price range camera that doesn't take anywhere near DSLR quality photos.

A single large photosite will collect as much if not more light than multisampled smaller sites, and does so with less complex wiring and less computational resources. Basically, it works better and is cheaper.

I'm not quite sure that's completely true--there's a good argument to be made that multi-sampling will reduce the noise floor since even though the SNR of the smaller sites is much worse than a bigger site, the noise between them is largely uncorrelated and will average out effectively.

A single larger pixel reduces its SNR by having more photon-capture events. A pixel, basically, multisamples itself. If you're getting a better result from sampling smaller photosites, it's because they have a larger collective surface area and are collecting more photons in total.

No, it is because you are doing something smarter than just adding the numbers together.

Big sensor, big good quality lens, and reasonable number of jiggapixels. Omit any one of the three and the images won't be that good.

Provide all three, and quite possibly the won't be any images, because this medium or large format camera will stay in the closet.

That's right. We carry phones with us all the time. I mean all the time. Some of us even use them as wallets. Soon we'll be using them to start our cars and unlock front doors. So we always have that camera with us.

Which is why I said we should accept what we can get until we find a way of incorporating SLR into a cell phone. It seems impossible today, yeah? HA! Nothing is impossible. Someday there will be an Ars article about a 1mm sq SLR sensor outperforming the best large SLR sensors. Then there will be another article about some new mineral outperforming glass in optics applications. Then a year later Apple, Canon, Nikon Nokia etc. will be using that tech in their products.

This isn't about including a SLR. This is about getting the most performance out of a fixed size of CCD. There's nothing that's been said that suggests a mechanism by which cutting up a CCD and adding back together again gets more performance out of a fixed size of CCD. You *can* put a bigger CCD into a phone, Nokia have shown that. But they have gone about it in a most idiotic way that increases cost and potentially wastes a lot of what they've added.

If this is their strategy, they'll fail the second someone cottons on to this market existing, sells a large-CCD cameraphone without the 41MP gimmick, and so produces a cameraphone that takes better photos and is $200 cheaper. The 808 Pureview, as a camera, is a DSLR price range camera that doesn't take anywhere near DSLR quality photos.

Wow. Did most of these commenters crawl out from under a rock? The 808 was released last year. To people. They have tested it. It takes great pictures. Sometimes you need to crawl out from under your textbook.

you are clearly not a shutterbug. There isn't a cellphone in existence that can take the same quality photos as a real camera. People seem to think MP is all there is to know to tell if a camera takes good photos. There's a bit more to it than that.

I don't think MP are everything. Nor do I think a cellphone will ever take as good a photo as a large sensor camera.

However the cell phone is inching it's way ever closer to eliminating the need for a point and shoot.

But seriously. Read up on PureView. Look at the photos. It's very impressive - and my point was that this phone is actually on the market, so real people have reviewed it.

Smartphones ARE point and shoot cameras. They already take nearly the same quality of photos. Why? Most of the popular compact point and shoot cameras have pretty much the same technology in them.

No. That only shows that averaging a few of the PureViews's noisy little pixels together works. And of course it does, since signal to noise ratio will increase with the square root of the number of photons counted, ie. the number of pixels averaged. However, a sensor of the same size, using fewer, larger pixels, would exhibit the exact same effect as its larger pixels would stop more photons. That second detector, with fewer pixels, would have less space wasted between the pixels and produce better images that require less readout electronics and processing. The noise reduction claims are 100% nonsense.

You might be right if the noise was linear, but it isn't. Read a bit about 1/f noise, add to that non linear noise reduction and you may realise that that will more than compensate the slight space lost between pixels.

pkirvan wrote:

The zoom claims are likewise 100% nonsense. When you activate the PureViews's digital zoom, you throw out the data from the periphery of the detector. You are left with a still high resolution, but very noisy image from the centre detectors. If you were to then fix the noise by pixel averaging, you would be left with the exact same low res, low noise image as any other detector of the same area, if not worse for the same reasons as above.

Yes, but you forget that the sensor is huge, so huge that in zoom mode the used size is same as on other smartphones. This way they got better image quality when non zoomed, and when zoomed it doesn't shy from other smartphones.

pkirvan wrote:

I wish Ars would educate you guys about this. The previous article they did fell for Nokia's bunk hook, line and sinker. And yes, I have a masters degree in image processing, so don't mess with me on this one.

You seem to miss the big picture. You missed the 1/f noise and ignore the fact that the zoom function needs to make some design changes for the non zoomed. Your claim that this is bunk, is simply bunk.

And if we want to play education card, mine includes DSP, image processing, microelectronics and computer technology. I'm perfectly qualified to mess with you on this.